New York|Prosecutor Recommends Loss of Vacation for Officer in James Blake Case

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Prosecutor Recommends Loss of Vacation for Officer in James Blake Case

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James Blake, the retired tennis star who was tackled by a police officer in 2015. The disciplinary hearing for the officer ended on Wednesday, and now enters a murky future.CreditCreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

Four days of public disciplinary hearings for a police officer accused of using excessive force to take down James Blake, the retired professional tennis player, boiled down to a single question, a prosecutor said: “Was there cause for force to be used?”

Jonathan Fogel, a prosecutor for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, posed the question in his closing arguments in a trial room at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday, as the proceedings neared their end.

Mr. Fogel, near the end of his statement, recommended that the officer, James Frascatore, forfeit 10 vacation days, a punishment that Mr. Blake said would be insufficient.

On a screen in the room, a surveillance video, which had helped catapult the episode on Sept. 9, 2015, into a national debate over how police officers accused of brutalizing civilians are often not held accountable, was stopped on a scene showing Officer Frascatore on top of Mr. Blake outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Almost two years ago, the review board, which investigates complaints of misconduct and abuse against police officers, determined that there was no reason for Officer Frascatore to use force against Mr. Blake, who submitted to the arrest even though he had been wrongly identified as a suspect in a credit card fraud ring. But hearings on the ruling were delayed until after efforts to resolve the case through a plea deal collapsed.

The trial finally began last week and ended on Tuesday, its path now shrouded in secrecy. The deputy police commissioner of trials, Rosemarie Maldonado, will find Officer Frascatore guilty or not guilty, and recommend a penalty, if necessary. The police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, will ultimately decide whether to accept, modify or reject her findings.

The process could take months, and the deputy commissioner’s findings and the commissioner’s ruling are shielded from public disclosure because of a state civil rights law, known by the clause 50-a, which forbids the release of personnel records of police officers, firefighters and correction officers. Police officials said in January that they were developing a protocol for releasing the outcomes of disciplinary proceedings, but a policy has yet to be adopted. An appeals court ruling in March affirmed the de Blasio administration’s interpretation that the law applies to disciplinary records, sidestepping a practice in place for four decades of making disciplinary action publicly available.

Officer Frascatore, in his testimony, said he believed Mr. Blake was armed when he approached him, and his lawyer sought to prove that the martial arts tactic the officer used to take down the tennis player was necessary, given what he knew, to prevent a foot chase on the crowded street or a fight against the hotel’s glass doors. Though the police turned out to be wrong about Mr. Blake and about the man whose photo was used to identify him as a suspect, the officer’s lawyer, Stephen C. Worth, justified it as a risk that comes when “police officers act in a proactive way.”

“Mistakes are going to be made,” he said. “As long as those mistakes are made in good faith, as there is absolutely no doubt happened here, then those officers have to be protected.”

The closing statements followed testimony from Detective Daniel Herzog, who was in charge of the financial crimes task force that was seeking the thieves, who had purchased about $3,000 in luxury shoes with fraudulent credit cards.

Mr. Blake has called for Officer Frascatore to be fired. Mr. Blake said a loss of vacation time would be inadequate for an officer whose record of complaints demonstrated a pattern of violent behavior toward black men.

“If he gets away with this, a slap on the wrist,” he said, “what’s to stop him the next time from being worse?”

The Police Department appeared to expand its interpretation of the 50-a clause during the trial when Commissioner Maldonado invoked the statute to close the courtroom to allow a retired police instructor to describe his role in a ticket-fixing scandal. The instructor, Daniel Modell, testified as an expert witness that Officer Frascatore had used reasonable force and could have opted to pepper-spray Mr. Blake or draw his firearm.

In court on Tuesday, Commissioner Maldonado explained that she had based her decision on a 2013 appeals court decision, which ruled that the statute applied to the records of retired police officers.

In that case, a panel of judges held that the disciplinary records of an off-duty state trooper who was involved in a hit-and-run crash could not be released to a reporter because the victim’s family was filing a wrongful-death lawsuit against the trooper. “In light of these circumstances and given the cloak of confidentiality accorded to officers’ personnel records,” the court said, “his interests may be adversely affected by a judgment ordering disclosure of documents sought in this proceeding.”

It was not clear how Commissioner Maldonado drew a line from that ruling to Mr. Modell. Two former police trial commissioners said it was unheard-of to close the courtroom for a retired officer appearing as an expert witness during another officer’s disciplinary trial.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Officer May Lose Vacation Days for Tackling Tennis Star. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe